Fact Check: Image of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar shared as illegal immigrants in Assam
BJP leader and former Mayor of North Delhi Municipal Corporation Ravinder Gupta has tweeted an image reportedly showing illegal migrants who entered Assam.
By Newsmeter Network Published on 2 Oct 2021 10:30 AM GMT
Hyderabad: BJP leader and former Mayor of North Delhi Municipal Corporation Ravinder Gupta has tweeted an image reportedly showing illegal migrants who entered Assam.
He wrote, "The jobs that the people of the country want are taken by the infiltrators, the grains are also given to those who work to break the security of the country. The BJP government is moving towards freeing the country from infiltrators, Congress party cannot stop us: HM". He used the hashtag "#घुसपैठियों_से_असम_मुक्त_हो"
Fact Check:
The claim is false.
NewsMeter performed a reverse image search that led us to a 2020 article by Pakistani news site Dawn. The image is titled, "More than 730,000 Rohingya Muslims were forced to flee northern Rakhine state in 2017 after a military crackdown that the UN has said was executed with genocidal intent." Rakhine is a state in Myanmar.
The same image was also carried by Daily Mail in 2017 and a Thai newspaper, Post Today. The Daily Mail had captioned the image, "A recent Mashable article blamed social media for fueling the horrific ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, a country where Facebook viewed on mobile devices has become for many people the sole source of news."
All these reports state that the viral image shows Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar.
In August 2017, Rohingya Muslims were forced to flee Rakhine province after an attack by Myanmar's military. The viral image is from this incident.
Clearly, the claim that the image shows illegal migrants who entered Assam is false. However, it should be noted that there is a large number of illegal migrants in Assam but this image is not from Assam.
